This paper seeks to understand the elements of revisionism in Sita’s Ramayana in the context of a sixteenth century retelling of Ramayan, Chandrabati’s Ramayan, a verse narrative composed by Chandrabati, the first women poet of Bengal. Sita’s character is one of the major literary tools through which women writers often attempt to re-view the Ramayan and subvert the male-centric reading of the epic.
Sita’s Ramayana is a graphic narrative in which Arni’s retelling is complemented by patachitra or scroll painting by Moyna Chitrakar, a female patachitra artist from West Bengal, India. The present paper aims to examine a female reinterpretation of Ramayan, Sita’s Ramayana by Samhita Arni, as a revisionist text. Revisionist mythmaking, from a feminist literary perspective, evolves through challenging a preceding text which predominantly manifests androcentric ideas.
Rich firmly advocates that women authors should create spaces for subversion of patriarchal values and ideals through their literary works. “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival”, writes Adrienne Rich in her seminal essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”.
